SNP needs to be hoisted out of power, but will Labour be any better? Joyce McMillan


It’s seventeen long years, since the last major inflection point in Scottish politics; and the world, back then, was a very different place. The British and American-led war in Iraq was still rumbling on, and had become a focus for discontent with Tony Blair’s New Labour government; and more than half way through a dozen years of Labour rule at Westminster, the tectonic plates of Scottish politics were also on the move.
The SNP leader Alex Salmond had cannily positioned his party just to the left of Labour on a series of issues, including foreign policy, and was ideally placed to inherit disaffected Blair voters; and in the Scottish election of May 2007, the SNP emerged for the first time as Scotland’s largest party, with Salmond as First Minister.
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Hide AdAt the time, the shift to the SNP made every kind of sense, for many Scottish centre-left voters. The SNP was pledged, far more strongly than Tony Blair’s Labour Party, to defend those elements of the UK postwar settlement that Scots held most dear; including an NHS free of creeping privatisation and wasteful “internal markets”, the free university tuition that had been instituted by Scotland’s first devolved government under Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and many other free provisions including medical prescriptions, personal care, and bus passes for all at age 60.
Now - four elections on - we can say that the SNP’s success in fulfilling that social-democratic agenda has been patchy at best. Yet its efforts to defend the ideal of a welfare state, in increasingly hostile times, have made significant differences in some key areas. It has, for example, robustly resisted the baseless suggestion that Scottish students would somehow do better under an English-style student loans system; and it continues to roll out new benefits - notably the Scottish Child Payment - which have measurably protected scores of thousands of vulnerable families from the worst impacts of the UK’s shameful poverty crisis, and mitigated the effects of the notorious two-child cap.
Equally importantly, it has maintained these policies while robustly defending the universalist approach that underpins many of them. The SNP, by and large, has not fallen for the right-wing argument that derides universal benefits as wasteful, and seeks to reduce the state benefits system to an unpopular ghetto for the poor and marginalised, rather than using it to enhance social capital and solidarity.
And in matters of defence and foreign affairs (generally beyond the Scottish Government’s formal competence) they have maintained a crucial symbolic distance from British foreign policy; one that enables, for example, stronger condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, and resolute and vocal opposition to Brexit. Hence the fury this past week over Cabinet Secretary Angus Robertson’s ill-advised meeting with an Israeli diplomat; and the same fury and disappointment now raging over the Scottish Government’s persistent failure to fulfil its arts funding promises - a failure which resulted, this week, in Creative Scotland’s shocking decision to shut down applications to its open fund for individual artists for the foreseeable future.
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Hide AdIn both cases, the rage is particularly intense not because other politicians and parties are not doing the same or worse; but because many voters in Scotland simply expected the SNP, in government, always to be better, and to do better.
Now though, that period is over. Visibly exhausted in terms both of domestic policy and of a persuasive vision for Scotland’s future, the SNP now needs to be hoisted out of government for its own sake as well as that of the nation, and given time to restore both its broken internal democracy, and its thinking on Scotland’s possible futures. As they signalled at the general election, Scotland’s SNP-Labour swing voters are now minded to give Keir Starmer’s government a chance; and barring political accidents, it seems likely that come May 2026, Anas Sarwar will be forming Scotland’s first Labour-led administration in almost two decades.
What is absent at this inflection-point, though - in stark contrast to 2007 - is any reasonable expectation that that change in government will bring any real improvement. It may currently be open season on the SNP, as all the grubby political flotsam of 17 years in power emerges into the light; but Labour is so bereft of alternative centre-left policies for Scotland that it has lately been reduced to the absurd argument that the Scottish Government’s financial difficulties are entirely due to its own “mismanagement”, rather than to Westminster austerity, and will somehow be resolved by the mere arrival of a new generation of Labour ministers at Holyrood.
In all likelihood, of course - and to judge by Rachel Reeves’s actions since she became Chancellor - the term “mismanagement” will soon prove to be mere centre-right code for “wasting money on silly universal benefits”. And with post-Brexit Westminster increasingly inclined to assert control over its restless devolved fiefdoms, as well as to pursue further austerity in public spending, Scotland may soon find its room for manoeuvre as a devolved nation greatly reduced, and many of the more popular and progressive policies introduced by successive Holyrood governments consigned to history.
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Hide AdWhether this is what Scottish voters really want, at this moment of change, seems doubtful; it is a depressing thing to know that a change of government is needed, and yet to be confronted with so many clear signs that the new boss will be no better than the old, and may well be worse. Yet politics moves on, and change we must; although in the sure and certain knowledge that if Labour in power ever begins to take Scotland too much for granted again, as it did for long decades between 1964 and 2007, then the political wheel will begin to turn once more - and in a direction that no UK government ever likes to see, as it contemplates the map of Britain and its territories, from the vantage-point of Westminster.
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